Laboring for Freedom by Jacoby Daniel

Author:Jacoby, Daniel
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317466543
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

A Path to Success?

Until the mid-eighteenth century few citizens pursued education past eighth grade, and less than 1 percent went on to college. As educational historian Laurence Veysey has put it, much of secondary and post-secondary education was devoted to classical subjects and “mental discipline,” which had limited application to everyday life. Private academies and colleges satisfied the elite’s demand for credentials, but they did little to prepare students for work.18 By the 1850s, this was beginning to change. Increasingly, citizens began to demand a more practical education, one that justified the long and costly investments students undertook. The federal government responded to concerns of farmers and mechanics by passing the Morrill Act of 1862 setting aside land grants to endow state universities. As science revolutionized trade, wealthy businessmen, too, began to appreciate the value of education to their organizations. In the late 1850s, inventor and industrialist Peter Cooper was among the leaders in starting institutes of technology. Cooper’s Union provided full scholarships for working-class men to pursue science and engineering; it also provided opportunities for young women to learn trades.19 A parade of businessmen, including Johns Hopkins, Ezra Cornell, John D. Rockefeller, Anthony Drexel, Leland Stan-ford, and Andrew Carnegie, soon endowed new institutions of higher learning. These institutions were both more practical and more scientific than older institutions like Yale and Harvard, which emphasized the classics.

Concern with the practical clearly made education more attractive to almost everyone. However, that attractiveness was not accompanied by equal access to all. As noted, few children went on to high school and fewer still to college. Because duration in school was highly dependent upon the income of a student’s family, Edward Bellamy and H.G. Wells had grist for their complaints. Novelists and educators alike were free to imagine other worlds in which money played a less crucial role. In St. Louis during the 1870s, Calvin Woodward designed a program of manual training to provide all children, rich and poor alike, with an education in the rudiments of tools and mechanics. Woodward’s manual training was designed to supplement a liberal education, not to displace it.20 It was argued that even those destined for brain work would benefit from an education that included handicrafts as well. Implementation of his ideas increased the popularity of secondary education in America. Even Edward Bellamy made manual training a central element in the profoundly changed schools of the utopia in which Julian West awoke in the year 2000.

In this future, schools eliminated “one of the great wastes, as well as one of the most common causes of unhappiness” of West’s and Bellamy’s earlier day. West explained, “The vast majority of my contemporaries, though nominally free to do so, never really chose their occupations at all, but were forced by circumstances into work for which they were relatively inefficient, because [they were] not naturally fitted for it.”21 The Cooperative Commonwealth in year 2000 instead sorted individuals into work that maximized their talents and preferences:

As an individual’s satisfaction during his term

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